The dunes are on the move.

In the market tonight a sixtyish man in one of those store-provided handicap carts was buzzing around the aisles, followed by a clerk who was helping him. (They’re really nice there.) At one point he lurched suddenly around a corner at me and I saw that the entire front basket on the cart was full of the largest possible containers of skin lotion. “You want all of these, really?” asked the clerk as she dropped a couple more in. Looking and sounding exactly like Jack Nance in Twin Peaks, he half-yelled “Yeah! I use them to PUT MY ARTIFICIAL LEG ON.” The bro dudes next to me, who were buying protein bars and vodka, looked stunned. I bet he has a fish in his percolator, too.

I think too much, I talk too much, I write too much. At least I don’t smoke, drink, or eat too much, so it’s more a problem for others than it is for me. Something I inherited from my father is the tendency to take over a conversation and deliver paragraphs, speeches, stories. Like him I have a compulsion, and like him I always feel later that I’ve overdone it. It’s like a miniature bipolar cycle in which I have the most! important! thing! to say! and then later on I bottom out and think “What the hell was I babbling about, and why were they so patient?” Stupid brain, can’t find a happy medium.

The new girl at Diedrich has a really forced-sounding Irish accent. I wonder what that’s all about?